Matthew Rabin
About
Born in New Jersey, I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and left in the mid-1980s, moving east and later west. I take photographs that fix where my attention lands—on man-made objects that conceal the past within the present.
I converted to Judaism during the pandemic. It gave me a model of interpretation—rabbinic interpretive practice—to create photographs that resist quick legibility and reward rereading. They invite the viewer to return—to turn the photograph over and turn it over again.
Artist Statement
two truths ground my practice. one: a photograph is a record of the photographer's attention—perceptive residue, fixed. my work is an artifact of my response to a subject and is agnostic to the audience. second truth: art carries the declarative force of “I am showing you this," and therefore presumes an audience.
my photographs live inside that contradiction. they unfold in aggadic paradox—the rabbinic tradition that prizes contradiction over resolution. the work holds together the solitary act of my perception with the necessity of an audience. why take pictures for yourself, only to hang them in a gallery? the question suspends meaning.
I treat them as excised fragments of possible narratives that happen in the interval between moments—where meaning can't, or won't, congeal. further muddling reception is the camera's false indexical claim. it is inherently unreliable and manipulative, the camera's neutrality a fiction.
I photograph the past within the present, instantiated through man-made objects. whether read through nostalgia, Proust's involuntary memories, or messianic time when history interrupts the present—though each lens sees something, my pictures refuse easy legibility.
I build my best work around an inverted punctum: points that prick and cannot be unseen, and resist being reduced to the smallness of a phone screen. I build from fragmentary movement, subtly destabilized space, aggressive cropping, and figures reduced to types rather than individuals.
when done right, my photographs function as a visual midrash—interpretive rather than declarative—using photographic mechanics (light, reflection, layering). formally, my pictures are parables about perception itself.
I borrow liberally. Walter Benjamin, Edward Hopper, and the photography of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Saul Leiter broadly, William Eggleston more specifically.
I return to indeterminate photographic moments—things glimpsed briefly from the corner of the eye.